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Showing posts with the label politics

THE MAGA DIARIES: MY SURREAL ADVENTURES INSIDE THE RIGHT-WING (and HOW I GOT OUT) (audiobook) by Tina Nguyen

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Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in January of 2024. Read by the author, Tina Nguyen. Duration: 7 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Tina Nguyen is a mainstream reporter now, but she started out in the world of conservative media. How conservative? How about working for Tucker Carlson before he joined Fox News? Nguyen had a boyfriend that connected her to the feeder system of conservative politics and media. Go through these high school programs and you get invited to college programs like the Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom at Claremont McKenna College and then on to think tanks, conservative media, or a staff position with a politician. Nguyen broke up with the boyfriend and went into conservative media...until she realized it was all very small, very inter-related and, in the end, unsatisfying and unable to pay the bills. Also, she discovered that one of her mentors was a racist creep and so was the boyfriend that brought her into the movement.  The author, Ti

TIRED of WINNING: DONALD TRUMP and the END of the GRAND OLD PARTY (audiobook) by Jonathan Karl

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  Published in November of 2023 by Penguin Audio. Read by the author, Jonathan Karl. Duration: 8 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl brings us his third book about Donald Trump as President and as former President. His first book covered candidate Trump and the first 3 years of the Trump Administration. The second book covered the last year of the Trump Administration with a special focus on all of the "stop the steal" claims. It was called Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show . Too bad it was not in fact Trump's "final act."  Karl has a long relationship with the former President. He interviewed 5 times before he even decided to officially run for President in the 2016 election. He's interviewed him multiple times since, including for all three of his books. Karl includes actual audio clips from those interviews (questions and answers) for the benefit of those that doubt. If you think Donald Trump is awesome, this is not the

THE KINGDOM, the POWER, and THE GLORY: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS in an AGE of EXTREMISM (audiobook) by Tim Alberta

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Published by HarperAudio in December of 2023. Read by the author, Tim Alberta. Duration: 18 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. Tim Alberta is a writer for The Atlantic and also an Evangelical. He grew up in the faith, but is very troubled by the tendency towards Christian Nationalism. He was inspired to write this book after an incident at his father's funeral at the church he grew up in.  Alberta embarked on a cross-country exploration of the intersection of Evangelicals and politics at Christian Nationalism - and how this combination is changing Evangelicals and they way they are perceived. Alberta does not come at this as an outsider. As I already noted, he grew up in the church - and still belongs to a church. To me, this is important. I read another book with a similar theme ( The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism ) that just didn't hit the right tone and answer the right questions because the author was coming from the outside. She didn

OATH and HONOR: A MEMOIR and a WARNING (audiobook) by Liz Cheney

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  Published in 2023 by Little, Brown and Company in December of 2023. Read by the author, Liz Cheney. Duration: 12 hours, 14 minutes. Unabridged. Liz Cheney is most famous for two things. Pre-January 6, 2021 she was famous for being Dick Cheney's daughter and a leader of the House Republicans.  Post-January 6, 2021 Cheney is most famous for being one of the leaders of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.  Cheney was one of the few Republicans willing to incur the wrath of Donald Trump and actually look into the role he played in the January 6 Attack. Cheney calls the book a memoir, but this is not really true. The book offers next to nothing about her childhood or her personal life. You know that she has a husband because she mentions that he helped her proofread various papers she had prepared for the committee.  Cheney starts with former President Donald Trump's election denialism immediately following the 2020 election date rather than her own li

TAKING AMERICA BACK for GOD: CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM in the UNITED STATES (audiobook) by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry

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Published by Tantor Audio in 2020. Read by Tom Parks. Duration: 6 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. Whitehead and Perry are the first sociologists who set out to do an in-depth study of Christian Nationalism and Christian Nationalists. Whitehead (Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis) and Perry (University of Oklahoma) both hail from states where Christian Nationalism plays a strong role in the political and cultural realms. First, you need a working definition of Christian Nationalism. Whitehead describes it as:    "a cultural framework that is all about trying to advocate for a fusion between Christianity — as they define it — and American civic life." I also like this description by a completely unrelated person,  Rev. Skye Jethani :  "Christians participating in politics or influencing society with their values is NOT Christian Nationalism.  Christians believing they have a God-given right to dominate the government & society by excluding & dimin

THANK YOU for VOTING: THE MADDENING, ENLIGHTENING, INSPIRING TRUTH ABOUT VOTING in AMERICA (audiobook) by Erin Geiger Smith

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  Published in 2020 bt Harper Audio. Read by Lisa Cordileone. Duration: 6 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. As the title says, his book is intended to be a primer on the history of elections in America and how elections work now in different states. It was thorough enough without drowning the listener in details. The book does a solid job with both of those major topics without feeling partisan. Those topics comprise the first and last two hours of this audiobook. The middle two hours just felt like padding. There was an extended discussion of how to raise the voter participation rate that just dragged with discussions of how businesses can encourage employees to vote, ad campaigns from local government, and so on.  I would rate the first two sections 4 stars out of 5, but the middle section is a 2 out of 5 at best. That makes a final score of 3 out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THANK YOU for VOTING: THE MADDENING, ENLIGHTENING, INSPIRING TRUTH ABOUT VOTING in AMERICA (

POVERTY, BY AMERICA (audiobook) by Matthew Desmond

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Published in 2023 by Random House Audio. Read by Dion Graham. Duration: 5 hours, 40 minutes. Unabridged. As of the day I am writing this review, 7 of the top 10 richest people in the world live in the United States (the least wealthy has $80 billion.) The rate continues on when you go down the list - 14 of the top 20 live in the United States.  The United States has 650 billionaires. But, the official poverty rate in the United States at this moment is 11.5% - the highest rate in the in the leading industrialized economies of the world. This chart shows that it has bounced around between 10.5% and 15%, depending on the economic recessions and the like f or the last 30 years . During this entire time, the United States has been the leader in wealth creation for the entire planet. The author, Matthew Desmond Sociology professor Matthew Desmond set out to find out why. It's easy to look at those billionaires and note that they don't pay their fair share. The tax code is tailor mad

THE POWER WORSHIPPERS: INSIDE the DANGEROUS RISE of RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM (audiobook) by Katherine Stewart

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  Published by Bloomsbury Publishing LLC. Read by Tosca Hoskins. Duration: 11 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. The book is a detailed look at the Christian Nationalist movement in America. The strength of the book is its meticulous research. It ties together famous names and organizations with less famous names pulling the strings through not-for-profits and political action committees across the country. The author, Katherine Stewart I come to this book as a lifelong, politically aware Christian. I vote, I read about politics and religion, I post about politics and religion and I listen to podcasts that discuss politics and religion. That being said, I am all for keeping politics and religion separate because politics taints and corrupts religion every time and twists it into something it is not meant to be. The book does have its weaknesses, though. One is that the author, Katherine Stewart, does have some degree of anti-religious bias. She is really bothered by religious groups rentin

LOSING OUR RELIGION: AN ALTAR CALL for EVANGELICAL AMERICA (audiobook) by Russell Moore

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  Published in 2023 by Penguin Audio in July of 2023. Read by the author, Russell Moore. Duration: 6 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. Russell Moore is currently a theologian for the magazine Christianity Today , but he is more famous for being one of the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) for the last 20 years - both as a professor and at the national level. He's also a prolific author and very media friendly. In many ways, Moore was the perfect media face for the Southern Baptist Convention - smart, likable, pleasant and often funny. But, he butted heads on a variety of topics with the rest of the leadership. He was against gay conversion therapy and he wanted the SBC to listen to women who accused men in church leadership of sexual abuse. He especially wanted Southern Baptists to talk about racism and its complicity in upholding Jim Crow laws and distance themselves from Confederate symbols like the flag.  The biggest thing they disagreed about and the thing that rea

AMERICAN REBOOT: AN IDEALIST'S GUIDE TO GETTING BIG THINGS DONE (audiobook) by Will Hurd

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  Published in March of 2022 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, Will Hurd. Duration: 8 hours, 47 minutes. Unabridged. Will Hurd has done a lot of things in his 45 years. He has been an operations analyst for the CIA (working in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan), he was worked in high-tech (including cyber-security and artificial intelligence), has served 6 years as a member of the House of Representatives from Texas, and is now a Republican candidate for President in 2024. This book was undoubtedly an attempt to introduce Will Hurd to a larger audience. I follow politics pretty well and I had never heard of Will Hurd until he announced his campaign for President in June of 2023 (to be fair, there are 535 members of Congress and most are not well known outside of their districts.) I heard about this book in a political podcast and, lo and behold, it turns out that my library had it. Just to let you know where I am coming from as I review this book, I am a Never Trump Repub

THE BIG BREAK: THE GAMBLERS, PARTY ANIMALS, and TRUE BELIEVERS TRYING to WIN in WASHINGTON WHILE AMERICA LOSES ITS MIND (audiobook) by Ben Terris

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  Published in June of 2023 by Twelve. Read by Tim Andres Pabon. Duration: 9 hours, 32 minutes. Unabridged. Ben Terris offers up a collection of stories about a few of the people that casual political observers have never heard of. I regularly watch the Sunday morning political shows and listen to political podcasts and I'd only heard of 4 of the people featured in this book, and only 1 of them by name.  That, of course, is the point of the book - a look at the movers and shakers below the obvious level of movers and shakers. Some move and shake a whole lot in the world of Washington politics, some barely do any moving at all, and some used to move and shake a whole lot but now have been sidelined by scandal. Terris looks at people like Matt Schlapp, who is the head of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) - the travelling roadshow of right wing politics. Schlapp is an example of a hyper-connected mover and shaker in the book. But, he also looks at people with less inf

THE CORRUPTION of LINDSEY GRAHAM: A CASE STUDY in the RISE of AUTHORITARIANISM (kindle) by William Saletan

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  Published in May of 2023. The author of this short book (129 pages) makes it clear that he has no particular grudge against South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham serves as a stand-in for the Republican Party in general. He is a particularly good stand-in because he was there from the very beginning of the Donald Trump phenomenon because he was one of the many candidates for the 2016 Republican nomination.  President Donald J. Trump and Senator Lindsey Graham Graham is also an amazingly frequent guest on the Sunday morning political talk shows, the evening shows on Fox, local TV, and talk radio. Graham loves to talk into microphones and because of that it is very easy to track his gradual moves from being a loudly outspoken opponent of Trump to the most vociferous defender of and apologist for the former president.  Saletan thoroughly documents this transition and backs up each of these subtle changes with hundreds of actual links to videos, transcripts, and news artic

WHITE EVANGELICAL RACISM: THE POLITICS of MORALITY in AMERICA (audiobook) by Anthea Butler

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  Published by Tantor Audio in 2021. Read by Allyson Johnson. Duration: 3 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. This book takes a short look at how the people that refer to themselves as Evangelicals and their forebears have dealt with race over time. An interracial marriage protest. The signs claim that interracial marriage is Communist and a sign of the anti-Christ. The book starts with the justifications that religious leaders used to defend slavery. After the Civil War, they modified those justifications slightly to defend the Jim Crow system. Butler contends that the Evangelical movements in the 1900's were worried about things like Communism, but it usually had a racial overtone to it - like when Martin Luther King was accused of spreading Communism to Black communities all over the country when he was just asking for the rights that White Americans already had. The heart of her book is about Billy Graham and what she calls out as a wishy-washy approach to racism. I am a bit more fo

THE PARANOID STYLE in AMERICAN POLITICS and OTHER ESSAYS by Richard Hofstadter

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  -Originally published by Harper's Magazine in 1964 and in book form by Alfred A. Knopf in 1965. -Audiobook published in 2018 by Tantor Audio. -Read by Keith Sellon-Wright. -Duration: 10 hours, 44 minutes. -Unabridged. Award-winning historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) wrote these essays over a series of years and compiled them into a collection with a loose theme of how American politics is affected by paranoid conspiracies.  Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) He starts with the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater and the political commentary of groups like the John Birch Society. His descriptions of the Goldwater campaign sound so much like the Trump campaign of 2016 that a reader can almost replace the name Goldwater with the name Trump. The details are, of course, different, but the tone is practically the same.  The ideological framework of the John Birch Society is replaced with QAnon, the fear of communism is replaced with the fear of immigrants but the tone is practica

THEY WANT to KILL AMERICANS: THE MILITIAS, TERRORISTS, and DERANGED IDEOLOGY of the TRUMP INSURGENCY (audiobook) by Malcolm Nance

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  Published by Macmillan Audio in July of 2022. Read by Ari Fliakos. Duration: 10 hours, 30 minutes. Unabridged. Malcolm Nance served for 20 years in the U.S. Navy in cryptology. His work led him to work in intelligence and counter-terrorism. Since his retirement from the military he has worked an additional 20 years as a consultant to the military, as a college lecturer on the topic of counter-terrorism, and as the head of a think tank. Nance applied what he knows about terrorism to the January 6 Riot and comes up with a series of disturbing conclusions. Nance is concerned that the most extreme elements of the MAGA movement have gone beyond rhetoric and casual flirtation with militia movements and have actively engaged with them. This book was published in July of 2022 but yesterday (November 29, 2022) two leaders of the Oath Keepers militia were found guilty of seditious conspiracy for their actions at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Why was a fringe militia group in Washington

GANGSTERS vs. NAZIS: HOW JEWISH MOBSTERS BATTLED NAZIS in WARTIME AMERICA (audiobook) by Michael Benson

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  Highly Recommended Published in 2022 by Tantor Audio. Read by Gabriel Vaughan. Duration: 8 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Flag of the German American Bund In the United States in the 1930's there was a small, loud, enthusiastic, and growing group of Americans that were great fans of Hitler and the Nazi party. They were largely ethnic Germans and formed organizations that sported Nazi symbols and mimicked the big rallies that Hitler had in Germany. They also mimicked the overt antisemitic speech exhibited by the Nazis. The most successful of these was the German American Bund (German American Federation). There were a lot of small groups but there were two larger organizations with a different take than the Bund. The Silver Legion of America  (Silver Shirts) had a spiritualist take on hate. Father Coughlin  was a literal Catholic priest who brought a "Catholic" view on antisemitic hate and anti-interventionism from Detroit. He had a massive radio audience that was so en